Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development, and they are seeking a Principal Software Engineering Manager to lead the development of Blackbird, their lexical and semantic code search engine. This role involves driving the technical roadmap, managing a team of engineers, and shaping GitHub’s AI product portfolio to innovate and improve developer experiences.
Responsibilities
- Drive and execute technical roadmap that aligns with product goals, ensuring that engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporating the adoption of new technologies and methodologies where applicable
- Work with organizational leaders to shape GitHub’s AI product portfolio, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives that scale globally
- Drive employee growth and development, manage performance, and ensure the engineering team's skills remain current by staying abreast of industry developments and best practices
- Own incident response and reliability practices, ensuring live services meet SLOs and postmortems drive systemic improvements. Oversee capacity planning to ensure performance, reliability, and compliance
- Champion experimentation and telemetry-driven development, enabling rapid iteration and data-informed decisions
- Identify novel bottlenecks in AI-powered development workflows to improve team and organizational impact
- Drive engineering excellence through automation, tooling, and standardization across deployment, testing, and operations. Facilitate cross-team communications, identify dependencies, and resolve conflicts to ensure seamless integration and support across products, applications, and services
- Partner with stakeholders such as product managers and technical leads to determine requirements for services or complex scenarios, leveraging feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs
Skills
- 11+ years' experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python
- OR Associate's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 10+ years' experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python
- OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field AND 9+ years' experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python
- OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 7+ years' experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python
- OR PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Math, Physics, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 5+ years' experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python
- OR equivalent experience
- 5+ years people management experience
- Experience building or operating web-scale search, information retrieval, or context retrieval systems
- Expertise with systems programming languages — ideally Rust
- Proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations in high-growth or ambiguous environments
- Experience designing or integrating AI/ML-powered features into production systems
Benefits
- Benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock
- Certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee's role
- Competitive pay
- Generous learning and growth opportunities
- Excellent benefits to support you, wherever you are
- Remote-first
Company Overview
GitHub is a software company that offers code hosting services that allow developers to build software for open-source and private projects. It is a sub-organization of Microsoft. It was founded in 2008, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with a workforce of 501-1000 employees. Its website is https://github.com.Company H1B Sponsorship
GitHub has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 3 in 2026, 26 in 2025, 17 in 2024, 14 in 2023, 20 in 2022, 20 in 2021, 10 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.